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abcd_f • yesterday at 4:22 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

The smallest meaningful program for MS-DOS was exactly 2 bytes:

  FA F4
That's CLI HLT, which effectively deadlocked the machine. Had to be saved as a .com fule obviously, not as an .exe.

Replies

smokel • yesterday at 9:01 PM

Somewhat more meaningful was "INT 19h" (CD 19), which also took 2 bytes and started the boot loader, bypassing the slow boot sequence of most systems.

And wouldn't a single instruction such as NOP or HLT be simply 1 byte?

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